There’s a lot of talk recently about StumbleUpon, among other social bookmarking sites, and how it’s a good way to discover new things that interest you as well as driving traffic to your site.
Not yet a believer
I still remain somewhat sceptical of StumbleUpon. Perhaps it’s because I don’t really want to spend hours of my day trawling through the things that other SU addicts found amusing. Perhaps it’s because I find it difficult to keep up with all the sites I have accounts with – I’m sure I’m signed up for things that I don’t even remember exist. Perhaps it’s because SU seems like such a fickle referral system. If you use it enough to build some friends and check out their ‘discoveries’ you might enjoy the reading, but when the front page of ‘recently popular websites’ contains a news article about stealing a cat… well, it doesn’t seem like quality entertainment to me.
Traffic leads to road rage
The title of this post refers to the dickwad theory (incase you didn’t notice!). I have a suspicion that SU might be a perpetuator of this kind of behaviour.
I’ve only discovered two things since I signed up with SU. One was a photograph that I’d hoped would get some votes on JPG Mag, the other was a blog post with a cute story. The story ended up being untrue, but even after that had been pointed out people kept writing stupid comments.
You can see in the comments that people used silly names without a link, so we can’t see who they might be, or what their thoughts on this topic and others are. Most of them didn’t read the other comments before they jumped to conclusions and jumped into their own replies. They (purposefully, I suspect) used provocative and insulting phrases and by doing so washed away any credibility they might have had; it’s obvious that an intelligent conversation won’t be had with them.
My question is: Is this the kind of traffic one actually wants on their site? If this is the kind of traffic that SU brings I think I’ll pass.
Going about it the wrong way
I’m leaving the SU link at the bottom of my posts, along with the other Sociable links. Not because I’m trying to be a hypocrite, but because I’m happy to have someone convince me of the merits of SU.
Guest post by Skellie on Problogger is quite a convincing description of SU. It suggests that I should have started with defining my interests. I’ve done that now so perhaps I’ll see something I find more interesting than stolen cats. ๐
However, the interests thing makes me wonder if people sit out there waiting to pounce on topics that they want to ridicule. Thus confirming and reiterating John Gabriel’s theory.
Newest on the Net article, Del.icio.us vs. StubleUpon describes SU as more of a socialising tool, versus Del.icio.us, which is more for bookmarking. From my limited observation so far Fred seems to be making sense on this point.
What do you think? Do you use StumbleUpon? Are you an addict? Has it brought you good traffic and returning readers?
I am not addicted to SU, but this is how I use it:
(1) I leave it to my readers to decide whether a post is worth stumbling. Sometimes I don’t even think that a post is worth it, but my readers stumbled anyway.
(2) If nobody stumbled posts that I think worth stumbling, I’d ask my friends to stumble them for me (but this only happens once in a while).
Traffic from SU doesn’t come immediately after it has been stumbled for the first time. In fact, it doesn’t come when you expect it to come.
What I’d suggest is that you do what you normally would, blog, reply to comments and all those routine things, and traffic will come by itself.
Dropping by to say HI! ๐
First thing first… my, you have a beautiful site. Did you customised the template? It’s beautiful.
I am shy to admit I’ve never really understood SU. I’ve seen many of my blogging buddies swearing by it. BUt then I guess there is nothing to lose… except those comments you mentioned.
That brings us back to the basic question. Is any comment better than no comment? ๐
I have never been too thrilled by social bookmarking sites, mostly because they didn’t offer me anything that my browser could not also do.
About the basic question: Is any comment better than no comment: NO. I can’t stand comments which just say ‘Nice’ or even worse ‘lol’.
I mean, come on, we should be capable of saying something more intelligent about almost any topic than that what this 3-letter-word represents.
To come back to the social bookmarking idea: Because I am slightly fed up with the existing sites, I have recently embarked on a project of creating my own service that does what it is supposed to do: Bookmark pages in such a way that you can keep track of them; no momentarily hype, but a solid foundation for referencing all your bookmarks.
At the moment I just refer to this idea as ‘graphical bookmarking’, however, the idea has only just been born. (Check out http://www.squawkdesign.com/we.....g_web_app/ for more info… feedback would be awesome…)
Oh, and kristarella: I came to this site due to recent comment on mine… I really like this pink. It is a bit shocking, but it is nice to see that there is still people out there who dare to use pink the way you do. Very readable site, too.:-)
Kristarella,
First of all thank you very much for linking to my story.
Second, I find StumbleUpon to be a very good short term bookmarking site. StumbleUpon is so easy to use. Once you have downloaded the toolbar, it is so easy to bookmark a site by giving it a thumbs up. While Delicious is better for long-term bookmarking, StumbleUpon is super easy, and it is nice sending some traffic to deserving sites.
Pelf – I agree, I think writing well and commenting on other’s blogs is a more valuable source of traffic.
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Helen – Hi! Thanks for dropping by ๐
Yes, I did customise the site, it’s the Copyblogger theme by Chris Pearson and I added my flair.
Obviously I’m not strongly one way or the other on SU, I’m just trying to figure out what the hype is about and whether I want to go with it or not.
I’d have to say that I think I’d rather no comment than stupid and disrespectful things. I don’t mind people disagreeing with me, but lets have an intelligible conversation about it rather than “if you blame the devil I will slap the taste out of your mouth”. They can only say that because I don’t know who they are, if it were in real life they would never say or do that and if they did slap me I would probably break their knee caps. I don’t really want those comments.
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Squawk – those comments are pretty lame too!
Wow, sounds like a really interesting idea. I look forward to seeing how it eventuates!
Thanks (about the pink and readability). The pink is just for October (Breast Cancer Awareness). I’ll probably go to a slightly less shocking blue or something after October (it was red before, which seemed to go down well with people).
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Fred – You’re welcome ๐
That’s a nice idea about giving traffic to deserving sites. I don’t use FF or IE though so I can’t use the toolbar. ๐ That will probably limit how much I get into SU.
Stumble upon is only as good as the categories you choose within your settings. I agree with the dickward theory as my post had a lot of stumblers (1000+ hits) and some of them idiotic (as you point out). You can see which ones actually irritated me by my replied comments. So in that respect, I really don’t think SU traffic is worth it as the quality is not there. Saying that, the only other post that I had a lot of stumbles upon was my Dancing lady one which received short/ non-insulting comments… so I don’t have much to judge and base this dickwad theory on.
On the other hand, when I am the one doing the stumbling, I have encountered very good sites so far. But only because I home down on the specific categories that interest me.
I think SU traffic is equivalent to Digg traffic as well. You’ll always find the dickwads and the non dickwads reading your article. The spikes of traffic are just temporary and create an artificial perception of how popular your blog is.
I believe the best kind of traffic are not the ones from SU or DIGG but the ones that know about you and ones you have established a good rapport with. Your blog community fan base if that’s how you want to look at it. With SU or DIGG traffic, you may get some good ones that come back to your site to read and comment sensibly but the chances are pretty slim for a low traffic blog like mine. I believe that the size, popularity and how established your blog is will determine the quality and quantity of the comments you get too.
And yes, I do agree with you that whenever you see an anonymous comment, the alarm bells should start ringing — it is more often the case that the person has something to hide and wants to say something controvertial without having any accountability/ tracebility. You’ll be lucky to get an intelligent/ decent discussion out of them.
It is hard to pinpoint delicious and SU as being a specific type of tool with specific type of usage … mainly because it all depends on the user e.g. technology users will use delicious and stumble upon in a different way than a user that is wanting to browse for fun. With that, the level of sites he or she bookmarks or stumbles will be vastly different.
Skellie says it perfectly about SU — you must know what you want to look for and home down on your categories before using these tools or else you’ll be dissapointed.
Heh, I suppose it was my fault Foo. If I hadn’t used the “Christian” word then no one would have said anything. There are respectful atheists and agnostics out there and there are assholes that make you wonder why you would ever want to believe what they do. I suppose those that just leave the comments alone fall into the first category. Whereas the Dancing lady was interesting and completely non-controversial.
You’re right though, it’s unlikely that SU is the most valuable source of traffic.